Music is math: ten songs about mathematics

Just for fun, here are ten songs about mathematics. Am I missing any good ones? Post them in the comments.

1. Finite Simple Group (of Order 2) by the Klein Four Group (lyrics). This excellent song was written and performed by graduate students at Northwestern University, where I did my graduate work. I think it is funny that I noticed the familiar stairwell before I noticed the familiar professors (in the background).

4. Pi by Kate Bush (lyrics). This is a surprisingly nice song in which Kate Bush sings the digits of pi (too bad she made some mistakes—artistic license wins over mathematical rigor?)

5. One Geometry (rapped to the tune of Snoop Dogg and Pharrell William’s “Drop it Like it’s Hot”) by Steve Sawin (AKA Slim Dorky) (lyrics). I posted this video about the Poincare conjecture on the day that Perelman was chosen as a Clay Millennium prize winner—an award that he famously turned down.

6. Down With That (Bolzano Weierstrauss Rap) by Steve Sawin (AKA Slim Dorky) (a previous blog post has links to the lyrics)

7. Lobachevsky by Tom Lehrer (I gave links to other math songs by Tom Lehrer in a previous blog post)

8. I Will Derive (to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”) (lyrics)

Great list Dave. Thanks for sharing. Here are a couple recommendations though not so strictly

Vi Hart’s (Doodling in Math) – 12 Days of Christmath – take out the commentary in between & you have a great Christmath carole

Vi Hart’s – Mobius Music Box – instrumental version of the Harry Potter theme, but mathematical in the approach taken to play it. She also arranged Pachelbel’s Canon to be played on 4 music boxes at one time

Lose Yourself in the Digits – Song for Pi Day – take off on Eminem’s “Lose Yourself (in the Music)” from his film 8 mile

Mathmaticious – parody of Fergie’s Fergilicious – light on depth of math concepts, but good parody

Enjoy.

By: Blair on January 16, 2011 at 1:58 am

And, of course, there’s a verse in Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue:

Now I’m headed back again, I’ve got to get to her somehow
But all the people we used to know are an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started, don’t know what they’re doing with their lives.

Our Signal Processing teacher gave us a sample of Lehrer’s Lobachevsky to use for testing with frequency and amplitude modulation (and Nikolaï Ivanovich Lobachevsky was his name!). Really fun song (although the poor guy is innocent of all that!).

In case people are interested, I’ve compiled a YouTube playlist with Dave’s suggestions and some of the others in the comments. I will add to it when I get a chance or as I come across new material. @John Golden, Thanks for sharing your list, I will add some of those.

And teachers at Lane Tech College Prep are putting together some songs about math. They call themselves The Postulates. The music hasn’t been released yet, but they have one performance online. The song is “Check Your Solutions” and is sung to the tune of The Raconteur’s “Salute Your Solution” (music starts at 1:30).

Finite Simple Group (of order 2) is part of the English classes that the new international TAs go through in the Georgia Tech School of Mathematics. The ESL instructor (yes, GT’s math department employs an ESL instructor, which helps a lot) has the lyrics typed out and uses it to teach the ITAs about words having more than one meaning, etc.

By: Mitch on January 19, 2011 at 10:19 am

I liked this one by Deidre Flint about the metric system. What ever happened to that?

[…] leave you with Dave Richeson’s fun post at Division by Zero: Music is math: ten songs about mathematics. One I particularly love is I will derive. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Wild About Math bloggers […]